Slashdot Mirror
Pakistan YouTube Block Breaks the World
Allen54 noted a followup to yesterday's story about Pakistan's decision to block YouTube. He notes that "The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan's traffic, PCCW, has found it necessary to shut Pakistan off from the Internet while they filter out the malicious routes that a Pakistani ISP, PieNet, announced earlier today. Evidently PieNet took this step to enforce a decree from the Pakistani government that ISP's must block access to YouTube because it was a source of blasphemous content. YouTube has announced more granular routes so that at least in the US they supercede the routes announced by PieNet. The rest of the world is still struggling."
So the article isn't clear on it. Does this ISP have an AS number that allows them to upload global routes? I would say that they should lose it. I can't think of another way that a single ISP could take out the whole internet's access to something. Pretty crazy.
Worst. Title. Ever.
What I wouldn't do for the ability to mod "-1, Plain Wrong"
There is a NANOG thread about this. Apparently a more specific IP route was advertised.
Here's what the BBC have to say about it.
It goes some way to explaining why YouTube became unavailable, but doesn't go into detail.
A lot has happened since the original story was written.
It's too bad that my comment from yesterday, which links to detailed technical information, is still languishing buried.
The PieNet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. PieNet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
I should also point out that while bureaucrats in Pakistan may be bone-headed for blocking content, companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco and so forth are the ones who built things like the "Great Firewall of China". Lots of Americans like the point their finger at governments like China, whereas they could actually have more of an effect in making companies in their own countries stop building this sort of stuff.
Sounds familiar, right along with the right to sentence to long jail terms, a few victims that got raped, letting the rapists go nearly scot-free.
They might as well isolate the country, keeping them from experiencing the interwebs altogether, it'll be impossible to keep their youth from being corrupted.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
To the people here in the U.S. who consider the Bush administration an oppressive theocratic regime, pay attention. This is the sort of thing an ACTUAL oppressive theocratic regime does.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Islam has various doctrines that are meant to be trials for those who subscribe to that faith. Ramadan is meant to teach patience and improve ones ability to resist temptation. If those temptations are removed by theocratic/governmental policing, the whole point is lost. Yes, a person may not have access to one area of temptation and therefore won't succumb because there's nothing to succumb to, but just like a butterfly emerging from the cocoon; if you see it struggle and decide to help it out, it won't have the ability to survive on its own later. If a muslim never even has the opportunity to face temptation because they are shielded from it at every turn, then on the likely chance that in their adult life they suddenly have multiple temptations blinding-siding them, they will have no internal facility to deal with it other than to cave in. I think the "Islam is evil" thing you're so sure is going to happen is because of how evil the intentions the governmental bodies that try to enforce it are. This is why separation church and state is so important in this respect. It was huge in christianity during the crusades. Fortunately many have seen the light and no longer impose faith as a law.
Better technical explanations of the event are available from the Renesys blog and Data Center Knowledge. The erroneous IP assignments spread across the net within 1 minute, 45 seconds of its announcement by Pakistan Telecom, according to a timeline by Renesys. It took about 80 minutes for YouTube to inform its providers that the route had been hijacked. YouTube says it is "investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again."
Evidently PieNet took this step to enforce a decree from the Pakistani government that ISP's must block access to YouTube because it was a source of blasphemous content.
The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.--Thomas Jefferson
[
"Works for me."
All Things Pakistan points out that this may have a political rather than a "cultural" reason - given that a number of videos of election rigging were posted.
Yes, OMG! How am I going to survive this day, the day that youtube.com went down the tubes?
A bit less hyperbole might have been more apt here, dear editors.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Censorship aside, no one should be struggling for YouTube. That's just sad.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
That's exactly what it allows, if your upstream provider isn't smart enough to filter the routes that you are allowed to announce. In theory your upstream provider won't accept any routes for IP addresses you don't own. In practice that isn't always the case, apparently.
They don't have any authority over that resource/address-space, so how and why are they allowed to create a black hole affecting the entire net?Because their upstream provider is apparently too stupid or lazy to filter the networks they can announce. Once you get to a certain point (peering links between Tier 1 providers for example) it may be easier to just trust the people you are peering with and accept everything -- but to accept all routes announced by a leaf link is just plain stupidity. I'm really kind of surprised that this happened.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080225-insecure-routing-redirects-youtube-to-pakistan.html
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'll check back for related questions to fill in any blanks later :)
SIG: HUP
Pakistan is generally a pretty tolerant country when it comes to matters involving religion. After all, they elected a woman as PM awhile ago. Musharaf is however a hardline dictator who has the power to greatly improve his country by setting a precedent for stepping down gracefully, but apparently like any other dictator, he's going down swinging. The US in praticular has a way of framing any problem with the middle east as a religious issue. It's a region with a whole hell of a lot of problems, religion being just one of them. I'm not defending any actions taken by their gov't, just trying to understand the situation. While not Arab or the first islamic nation to hold free elections, this situation has the potential to set a lot of progressive reforms on the Middle East.
still at least the Pakistanis will now the spared the inevitable custard pie and ridicule videos that will now flood youtube parodying this fuck up.
I'm more in favor of this being motivated by the large number of vote rigging videos and independent news vids floating around youtube that are outside of Pakistani government control.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
If you really follow everything the book says, Islam IS evil, and so is Christianity and Judaism, and Hinduism. Buddhism is okay though, i think.
Apparently the story behind the story is that Youtube videos were showing evidence of vote rigging in the PAK elections. So this is the perfect Slashdot story, voting fraud and internet denial, surely it deserves some sort of gold star.
And religion was just a dead herring.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
But mullahs forbade printing for 200 years, while in Europe it exploded. Mostly it was silly: religious stuff, cartoons, sex, but it was also maps, mathematics, etc.
Internet is about the same as an invention of printing was then. And again they are making the same mistake, again due to a fear of mullahs to lose their power.
Like 500 years ago it will just slow the development of their civilization.
My own personal suspicion is that one very easily can help a butterfly emerge from its crystalis; if one doesn't damage the wings in the process, the butterfly would probably benefit greatly from not having to struggle free. It's not as though they face great epistemological issues in their daily lives.
"If those temptations are removed by theocratic/governmental policing, the whole point is lost." No, it is not. There are natural temptations and there are temptations society could avoid.
That is why Islam has social laws against bad public behavior.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
For those of you who actually want to know "How they did it?" posted from: Renesys Blog
/24 that has been hijacked to its providers
/25 routes are first seen from 36561
/25 routes from 36561
which was found from Cydeweys which is updating as the story progresses. Both of those sites seem to be running a bit slow, so hesitate before clicking.
Full text of Reneysys: Pakistan hijacks YouTube.
A few hours ago, Pakistan Telecom (AS 17557) began advertising a small part of YouTube's (AS 36561) assigned network. This story is almost as old as BGP. Old hands will recognize this as, fundamentally, the same problem as the http://merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/1997-04/msg00380.html">infamous AS 7007 from 1997, a more recent ConEd mistake of early 2006 and even TTNet's Christmas Eve gift 2005.
Just before 18:48 UTC, Pakistan Telecom, in response to government order to block access to YouTube (see news item) started advertising a route for 208.65.153.0/24 to its provider, PCCW (AS 3491). For those unfamiliar with BGP, this is a more specific route than the ones used by YouTube (208.65.152.0/22), and therefore most routers would choose to send traffic to Pakistan Telecom for this slice of YouTube's network.
I became interested in this immediately as I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to spend my evening watching imbecilic videos of cats doing foolish things (even for a cat). Then, I started to examine our mountains of BGP data and quickly noticed that the correct AS path ("Will the real YouTube please stand up?") was getting restored to most of our peers.
The data points identified below are culled from over 250 peering sessions with 170 unique ASNs. While it is hard to describe exactly how widely this hijacked prefix was seen, we estimate that it was seen by a bit more than two-thirds of the Internet.
This table shows the timing of the event and how quickly the route propagated (this is actually a fairly normal propagation pattern). The ASNs seeing the prefix were mostly transit ASNs below, so this means that these routes were distributed broadly across the Internet. Almost all of the default free zone (DFZ) carried the hijacked route at least briefly.
18:47:00uninterrupted videos of exploding jello
18:47:45first evidence of hijacked route propagating in Asia, AS path 3491 17557
18:48:00several big trans-Pacific providers carrying hijacked route (9 ASNs)
18:48:30several DFZ providers now carrying the bad route (and 47 ASNs)
18:49:00most of the DFZ now carrying the bad route (and 93 ASNs)
18:49:30all providers who will carry the hijacked route have it (total 97 ASNs)
20:07:25YouTube, AS 36561 advertises the
20:07:30several DFZ providers stop carrying the erroneous route
20:08:00many downstream providers also drop the bad route
20:08:30and a total of 40 some-odd providers have stopped using the hijacked route
20:18:43and now, two more specific
20:19:3725 more providers prefer the
20:28:12peers of 36561 start seeing the routes that were advertised to transit at 20:07
20:50:59evidence of attempted prepending, AS path was 3491 17557 17557
20:59:39hijacked prefix is withdrawn by 3491,
Maybe it should. And maybe people should study history more and realize that the rights of the people should not be taken away (by a Monarch or an elected Legislature) for any reason. That was one of the underlying principles of the Magna Carta and the Common Law -- the right to limit the power that the Monarch/Legislature/Government has over us and the idea that Governments derive their power from the consent of the Governed (to quote the US Declaration of Independence).
It seems that history taught us that we have the right to limit the power of the Monarch but not that we have the right (and necessity) to limit the power of the elected legislature. An elected legislature can trample on your rights as easily as a monarch can unless you take steps to prevent it.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
BBC said the outage was only for two hours.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I debated whether or not to even mention my involvement with him because half of the Democratic Party has yet to accept him, let alone the other half of the electorate.
I'll have to look into what his positions are on our trampled rightsFWIW, he was a civil rights attorney at one point in his life.
because Obama is the kind of "fresh air candidate" who will at least listen to the people.He's still going to need help. To quote him "Good ideas go to Washington to die". We'll never see any meaningful change come out of Washington until we decide to hold our Congressman to account for their actions. Nobody does though. How else do you explain that Congress (as a whole) has approval ratings in the 20s, yet people continue to send their existing Representatives back, year after year?
People are going to need to get involved in the process and speak louder and more forcefully then the special interests/lobbyists that have hijacked Congress. If that happens then I'm actually very hopeful that Obama can manage to unite this country. If it doesn't happen then I still feel that he will be a force for good -- but his grander ideas will probably fall off and die.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So if an Islamic court has any authority to order the PTT to block YouTube because of "blasphemy", it's because YouTube is carrying political news about the situation in Pakistan that Musharraff doesn't want people in Pakistan watching. If Iran had tried that kind of thing, that really would be a theocratic problem, but that's not the issue here. If they implemented it in a way that blocks YouTube from the rest of the world, it's because of incompetence, not malice. (That kind of thing happens a lot, usually because somebody does a bad job of router configuration, but usually ISPs filter out incorrect advertisements; their upstream provider didn't do a good enough job here.)
So in some sense it is similar to Bush in the US - pandering to the religious right wingers as a way to get radical right-wing politics done.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hey, I didn't say he was perfect. I'm generally not in favor of Gun Control at all, which probably makes me an oddity amongst Democrats, but there you go.
Gun control will probably be one of the easiest issues for the country find common ground on. Most Democrats aren't married to the idea of restrictive gun control as a one-size-fits-all solution for the whole country. Most Republicans probably don't want to see explosive armor piercing cop-killing rounds in general circulation either. As usual an effective solution will require (*gasp*) compromise on both sides and that won't happen unless the citizenry speaks out and marginalizes the extremists on both sides of the issue.
I'm generally of the opinion that any citizen not convicted of a crime should have the right to own any semi-automatic weapon. I get nervous when the Government decides to go after "assault weapons" as though they are some special class more deadly then others. I get real nervous when the burden is shifted to the citizen to prove that he can own a gun, rather then the Government having to prove that he can't.
Fully-automatic weapons is a discussion worth having -- anybody with access to a machine shop and some basic skills can turn a semi into a full-auto, so any ban isn't really effective... But the regulation of fully-automatic weapons goes back a few decades and might actually serve a purpose.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Just about any ISP is going to get themselves a BGP Autonomous System Number and use BGP to communicate with other ISPs.
A long long time ago, when the Internet was smaller and more trusting, long enough ago that I've forgotten the names of the guilty parties, some company in Virginia made a mistake in configuring their router, and announced that their T1 was a really really good route to MAE-East, and about 1/3 of the packets on the Internet decided to go use their T1, for a couple of seconds before it melted... Since then, it's become a Best Current Practice for ISPs to filter out routing announcements from their customers, and most ISPs also filter their peering links with other ISPs, though some are more aggressive about it than others (plus they tend to have limits on how specific a route can be announced, just to keep router table sizes from exploding.)
But even with that, occasional glitches can happen. A couple of years ago, an ISP in South America did a bad job of route summarization (probably using RIP internally, which uses the old Class A/B/C system instead of CIDR), and announced a route for the
It's highly unlikely that PCTL was trying to block YouTube access for the whole world, as opposed to just for their country. That doesn't mean what they did was competent, of course, but it's not too surprising that somebody exported a route to their peers that they really only intended for their customers. Their upstream provider probably should have filtered out the announcements as well. But things like this do happen, and if you're likely to be a major target, either of malice or of incompetence, you need to do the extra work to monitor route announcements that include your address space.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If a work of literature isn't supposed to be taken literally, who decides what's the "correct" interpretation? I'm sorry, but the views of the extremeists are equally as vaild as the most liberal in any religion. Sure, the liberal views are more moral for us, but what does God think? I dunno, and therin lies the conundrum.
*sigh*, I think you largely missed the point. Let me spell it out for you using the words of Thomas Jefferson:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it
(emphasis mine)
Every law, by its very nature, takes away the rights of the people. The only way for a government not to take away rights is to abolish all laws.That's such a blatant oversimplification that I hardly know where to respond. The spirit of our Declaration of Independence (and all those other documents I referenced earlier) is that the Government exists to secure our rights -- my right not to be murdered by you trumps your right to do whatever you want. The Government derives it's power from the consent of the Governed and not the other way around.
How soon we forget our own history.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'm sorry, the "right" to murder? Where is the "right" to murder outlined in the Common Law, Magna Carta, US Constitution or any other historical document of note? The whole point of Government is to secure our rights against those that would take them away from us by force. I fail to see how you can make the argument that protecting my right to "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" is taking away something from you. Your "right" to murder? Are you serious?
but it is still taking away rights regardless of those facts and regardless of whatever Jefferson has to say on the matterWell, if you want to debate our rights being taken away then let's do it. We can start by talking about habeas corpus, the right against self-incrimination, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, the erosion of the Grand Jury, the erosion of gun rights, etc, etc, etc. But it's hard to take you seriously when you shoot down my idealism with the claim that by outlawing murder the Government is taking away one of your "rights".
While "the government should never take our rights away!" might be a nice-sounding slogan, what it actually means is a hell of a lot different to what (I assume) you intended to express.Perhaps. It might have sounded better if I had said "The Government has no right to take our rights away without due process of law". That probably would have been a better statement on my part and more in-line with the traditions and history that I was trying to defend.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Last time I checked, 1971 camr before 2003. So data from 1971 can't be used to answer a "since 2003" question.
That might look like a snappy rebuttal if you squint at it just right, but add in a few more facts and it doesn't look so pat. Consider:
--MarkusQ